“A Life of Continu’d Variety”: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s <i>Moll Flanders</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a contribution to debates on the structure of Daniel Defoe’s novels, this article argues that the design and much of the content of Moll Flanders can be better understood through identifying common eighteenth-century reading habits and the ways in which authors sought to cater to them. A significant factor in shaping works was the conviction of authors and publishers that their readers wanted “variety” in prose fiction. Efforts to ensure the provision of variety for readers helped shape Moll Flanders, notably the treatment of Moll’s crimes and the long deferral of her descent into the criminal underworld. This principle of providing variety also meant that certain episodes could unproblematically invite greater attention than the plot strictly required in order to engage a more diverse audience by catering to sociable reading practices and the love of gossip. Considering Moll Flanders in this way invites revision of current critical ideas about what constituted a well-designed prose narrative for readers of the early eighteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".